Bread and Butter Pudding

Another brilliant way to use up leftovers is to make bread-and-butter pudding.

Bread and Butter Pudding. Instagram pic credit: SimoneySunday

Too many people throw away crusts of bread or bread that has started to go slightly dry. This is a terrible waste.

According to a study published in September in The Guardian, 49 per cent of UK adults claim they they eat bread every day, with 38 per cent of them buying two loaves a week.

However, the research, commissioned by the group Love Food Hate Waste, as part of its #UseYourLoaf campaign, also found that 18 per cent often threw away a forgotten loaf before opening it, while a quarter of had discarded the bread before reaching the end of the loaf.

I haven't bought bread for over a year, not since we were given a breadmaker for a wedding present. Instead of keeping this as one of those 'gadgets' that never get used, I decided to use it.

Flour, yeast, milk, oil, water, salt and sugar - these are the basic ingredients to making brown bread or white bread. And as one 1kg bag from Tesco costs about 80p, and I can make 2.5 3lb loaves from one bag of flour, I basically spend £1.60 on five loaves of bread.

I've already shown how to make cheap sauce and jam for gifts or just slathering onto toast in this blog. I will do a post later on how to make Rosemary bread with olive oil. Yum!

With the bread I make, I cut half of it straight away, and one half I wrap up tightly and put in the fridge, where it keeps about a week.

The other half, I slice, and wrap and put into a tupperware tub for making sandwiches in the near-term. Sometimes I freeze slices individually for 'emergencies'. This really reduces waste - which also reduces our yearly food bill!

However, when there's one slice left and some crusts, I take a bread knife, create some thinner slices, lather them in butter... and prepare a bread and butter pudding.

How to:
Take 2 medium eggs
2/3 cup of semi-skimmed milk (or cream if you really like it rich)
Handful of currants or raisins, washed
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
Your slices of buttered bread

Cut the bread into small enough pieces to create layers - bread & butter, some raisins, some brown sugar, some of the spices.

Do this as many times as you can. Sprinkle the rest of the raisins over the bread and butter.

Mix the remaining spices up with the eggs (whites and yolks) and the milk, and pour over the bread and butter.

Cook for about 1/2 hour at 160 degrees or until you can see the mixture is no longer runny.

Serve with cream, custard or home made icecream - a recipe for this is also here.

Enjoy!

Applesauce

I have found two things to be true with regard to shop-bought apple sauce

1) The good, natural, stuff is expensive
2) The cheap, preservative-laden stuff tastes of sugar and had the
texture of mush

I wanted to make my own but I did not have a recipe to hand. So I did what anyone would do - ask a former Army corporal, aged 75 years, what he put into his own version.

'Lemon and spices' he said. 'And boil it properly without too much water'. So I took Rodger's advice when I came to preparing an apple sauce made with a bag full of Julia's lovely Bramleys. I love it when friends give you freebies! This is such a good way to save money and eat healthily! These apples were still not quite ripe although were windfalls, so had that extra crispness and tang.

Ingredients
200g of Bramley apples, peeled, cored and chopped
1 cup of water
1/2 cup brown sugar tablespoons of brown sugar, to taste (add more if you like sweet sauce)
3 tablespoons of lemon juice
1 tablespoon of malt vinegar
1 teaspoon of mixed spices (cinnamon, mace, ginger, crushed cloves)
1/4 teaspoon of salt

How to
Clean the apple chunks. We do not like mushy food so left the chunks quite large, but you can dice or slice more thinly

Boil these in a pan with the water, vinegar, lemon juice, sugar and salt until it reduces. It should look similar to chunky babyfood.

Immediately put the pan on a low heat, and stir in the spices for 1 minute.
Taste it. It should be quite tangy and not too salty or bitter. If you need to, add 1-2 tablespoons more of sugar and stir for a couple of minutes. 

We do not like sugary tasting sauces in our house but I appreciate that everyone's tastebuds are different.

When it suits your palate, remove from heat and let it cool.
Wait until it cools before putting into clean jars.

The finished product - in interesting jars!

I keep old jam jars for this purpose, as it saves money buying new ones. However I do relabel them with the date of manufacture on it. This helps me to work out how long it will keep in the fridge, which is approximately 3-4 weeks, and stops hungry visitors from mistaking it for jam (recipe to come soon).

So far we have used this with 'posh' bangers and mash (recipe for 'posh' mash can be found here) and as an accompaniment to my hubby's ham and cheese sandwiches for work, which he said were 'really nice'. 

This is a compliment indeed; his usual response to 'how do I look' or 'what do you think' is 'fine'. will try it on Pork Roast for a Sunday lunch soon.

Thank you, Julia, for the apples and thank you, Rodger, for preventing me from drowning my apples in too much water!